


Coatlicue

by havocthecat



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Community: femslashex, F/F, Falling In Love, Femslash, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, Vampires, Women in Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-14 13:25:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8015686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havocthecat/pseuds/havocthecat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coatlicue, the snake goddess who gave birth to the moon and the stars, and the patron of women who die in childbirth, shows us that the earth both consumes and regenerates life. In a divergent timeline of From Dusk Till Dawn, Seth and Richie fail to escape the labyrinth, and Santanico is forced to look elsewhere for help escaping the Nine Lords of the Underworld.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coatlicue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arcturus_Sinclair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arcturus_Sinclair/gifts).



Vanessa’s sitting in jail, slumped back in her chair and waiting for her shitty ass public defender who knows less about the law than she does, when she sees the woman. She strides in the door, pretty as you please, a pretty Mexican lady wearing black velvet panties held together at the sides by three strings and a matching black velvet push-up bra. 

She’s fancy, with a black silk robe that don’t hide a damn thing, a gold armband, and a rich gold necklace with three dark red stones on it. Garnets, probably, because Vanessa ain’t never seen a ruby so dark. This lady, she’s got long black hair that any man would think was done simple, brushed that straight, but with no hair out of place, Vanessa knows someone’s spent hours on it. Not this lady, whoever she is, with her sharp red manicured nails. Her lips are painted blood red and her makeup is just as damn perfect as the rest of her

Whoever she is, she’s either a porn star, a stripper, or the highest class hooker Vanessa’s ever seen. Except she doesn’t exude sex. This is just what she wears. That’s when the pieces stop fitting together. She’s no bored high class whore brought in to entertain some drug lord with with more money than sense, who wants a little girl talk before the guards take her for a conjugal visit. Vanessa looks around, and not a damn guard in the place is staring, not even the one gossip has it will give you extra time on the phone if you flash your tits at him. 

“Your ex-husband and his brother are idiots,” says the woman, and the alarm bells going off in the back of Vanessa’s head turn into a pack of fire trucks heading off to a five alarm fire. 

Whoever she is, whatever she’s doing, she ain’t real or she aint’ here, so Vanessa just raises her eyebrows up and thinks to herself, “Why don’t you tell me somethin’ I don’t already know, baby?”

Taking care of Richie while Seth was in jail, Vanessa wouldn’t be surprised if she’d caught whatever brand of crazy he had. She was sure as hell crazy enough to land her ass in jail not ten minutes after her no-good ex had dumped her ass for his brother, so maybe she was just crazy-ass enough to see ladies who weren’t there. 

“I need you,” says the lady, leaning forward and showing off a double handful of creamy smooth skin on her tits. She’s turned into an oasis of sexy in the middle of orange jumpsuits and beige guard uniforms. Damn if she isn’t delicious enough to start Vanessa throbbing between her legs. But Vanessa’s no horny teenager, and she swore off thinking with her pussy when she was sixteen and thought Jimmy’d knocked her up in the back of his daddy’s pickup.

“Then I guess you’re shit outta luck unless you wanna play tit for tat,” thinks Vanessa, not out loud because she ain’t dissociative anything. She’s stuck in jail, up on charges for taking half a dozen hostages, and she’s going away for a real long time unless she can cash in some of those bonds to pay for a real lawyer. She ain’t up for bail, not now, not ever. Not Seth Gecko’s ex-wife, even if that no-good son of a bitch up and left her sorry ass at a Big Kahuna Burger. Not with the number of outstanding warrants Vanessa’s runnin’ from. Been runnin’ long enough that she thought that maybe, just maybe, this time Seth wouldn’t throw her over for Richie. Shoulda known better.

It’s gonna come down to being smart and planning careful. Maybe she’ll get lucky too, since she looks to be getting a full dose of crazy from the Geckos and they got that and luck in spades. 

The lady looks interested, and then she’s gone, because Vanessa’s public defender is sittting in her chair in a shiny polyester suit. His hair’s slicked back and pomaded, and his naugahyde briefcase is worn around the edges. Public defenders don’t make shit, so they put out shit for effort. 

Vanessa pastes a smile on her face and flutters her eyelashes at him, pretty as you please. “You gotta rely on every weapon in your arsenal,” said her mamma, with hairspray in one hand and a makeup brush in the other, “and boys ain’t never gonna look past skin deep, so you better keep your skin deep pretty as pie and take ‘em for all they got while they’re staring at your tits and pretending they’re looking at your face.” Vanessa could really use her mamma’s advice, if the cancer hadn’t gone and taken her a dozen years ago.

“Ms. Styles,” says her public defender, holding out his hand. His voice is as oily as his hair. “I’m the attorney assigned to your case. We’ll have a lot of work to do on your case, but we’re in it together. I think we can plead you down to about twenty years. Fifteen for good behavior.”

Vanessa makes it through her meeting with her attorney and gets led back to her cell, where she sits in her orange jumpsuit and starts calculating each and every advantage she has. All she’s got on her side is her brain, a cut rate lawyer, and a hallucinatory lady dressed like a high class whore who makes Vanessa get butterflies in her stomach like she hasn’t had since she made out with Carolina in the break room at Wal-Mart. The whore is looking better than her idiot lawyer any day of the week and twice on Sundays. 

Shame it ain’t Sunday. Vanessa could’ve sworn it was, seeing as how the lady’s back to standing in front of her, looking like a cool drink of water and earning every bit of the glare Vanessa’s pretending she’s aiming at the wall. She ain’t a fan of cryptic or of hallucinations, and this lady’s both.

“My name is Kisa,” says the woman, settling down next to Vanessa on her bunk. No weight to her, though, not that Vanessa’s stupid enough to think there would be. She’s less demanding. Almost sounds like a real person. “They call me Santanico Pandaemonium. They force me to dance for them. To whore for them.” She spits it out, angry like no hallucination could ever me.

“Men are assholes, and that ain’t the worst of it,” says Vanessa, out loud this time, before she curses herself out inside. “Worst of it is that we keep falling for ‘em.”

“Sing it, sister!” calls out some broad from the cell next to her. Vanessa rolls her eyes. 

“I’m not a hallucination,” says Kisa, pretty as a picture and smelling like morning glories and copper pennies. The air around Vanessa is chill as stone, and she gets the sudden idea that Kisa ain’t seen the sun in years. 

“If you’re no hallucination,” thinks Vanessa, and maybe she whispers it out loud, but she’s denying that until her dying day, “what are you?”

“Someone else let down by the Gecko brothers,” says Kisa, and ain’t that the truth. It’s in Kisa’s eyes. She’s been let down by everyone around her, tied up, and her only chance is another woman in the same damn boat. “I can help you get out of here. If you promise to help me.”

Damn it all to hell ten times over and back again. “Why me?” asks Vanessa. She’s just some ex-wife who turned in her man because his brother’s a crazy, serial-killing motherfucker. 

“Because you can see me,” says Kisa. 

“If you can get me out of this mess, I’ll work on getting you outta yours,” says Vanessa. She smiles and her mouth pulls tight, the way mamma’s did days her daddy come home from work by way of the bar. “Getting a woman out of a bad mess like ours, that’s no man’s job.”

Kisa laughs, bitter and a more’n a little jaded, like she’s been in a bad mess longer than Vanessa’s been alive. All this weird shit going on, maybe she has been. 

They call lights out and Vanessa lays down in her bunk. Kisa vanishes in the dark, the smell of flowers fading out, and Vanessa falls asleep. It’s one more thing on her side, at least she knows how to get a good night’s rest.

Vanessa wakes up, but it’s a dream. Has to be a dream, because you don’t fall asleep in jail and wake up outside a whorehouse, still wearing fancy prison duds. Bikes and trucks are scattered round a deserted parking lot and there’s a giant neon pinup girl with huge jugs and a hand reaching out to pinch her nipples into bright red cherries. The sign is flashing “Titty Twister” at her, open from dusk till dawn. It’s well past dusk and she’s dreaming anyway, so Vanessa squares her shoulders and heads on in.

The first thing she notices is blood splashed on the walls like some idiots forgot they owned a paintbrush. It stinks in here like blood and shit and piss, and fuck if those aren’t someone’s intestines hanging off a table. 

The second thing Vanessa notices is that she’s smelling, and she don’t smell shit in a dream. Fuck if anyone does. So is she still dreaming, or is she in a strip club-cum-whorehouse named the Titty Twister? 

She pinches herself. The pain’s a bright, sharp shock of clarity and Vanessa doesn’t wake up in a jail bunk. However in the hell it happened, Vanessa’s in Mexico, with neon twisting titties and topless girls girls girls flashing in the door outside, and brains, guts, and gore splattered every damn where on the inside. 

“Follow me,” says Kisa, standing in a doorway and reaching for her. Her eyes are scared, but she’s still pretty as a picture and as tasty looking as apple pie. “We have work to do.”

Vanessa’s taken ten kinds of risks every day of her life since she was a grown woman. She swallows, trying not to breathe too deep, and smiles at Kisa. She takes one step forward, then another, until she’s spitting distance. Kisa still smells like morning glories, the pride and joy of her mamma’s garden, and copper pennies, except it ain’t pennies, just blood and nothing else, not death, not shit, and who the hell smells like blood and flowers? The closer Vanessa gets, the less she smells the slaughterhouse behind her.

“Sister,” says Kisa, smiling for the first time since Vanessa started hallucinating her, then realized she was stuck cleaning up Seth and Richie’s mess after whatever weird shit those two dumbasses had gotten themselves into.

“At least you picked the right woman for the job,” says Vanessa. She takes Kisa’s hand, takes it and touches her cool skin, steps forward one more time into Kisa’s arms and Vanessa's stomach curdles. Whatever she's doing, she’s stepping right on into hell in a pretty lady's arms.


End file.
